Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John P. Marquand, the author of best-selling New England tales of manners, covering the invasion as a war correspondent, wrote these first impressions of Iwo: “Its silhouette was like a sea monster, with the little dead volcano for the head, and the beach area for the neck, and all the rest of it, with its scrubby brown cliffs for the body.”

  And off they went, the 4th and 5th divisions abreast, while the 3rd Division hung back in reserve, a decision later to become controversial. Why hadn’t all three powerful divisions hit the enemy simultaneously?

  John Basilone and his platoon would hit the beach in the fourth wave about nine-thirty a.m. He would be under fire for the first time in more than two years, since the ’Canal in late 1942.

  In Hawaii, John’s brother George had questioned him closely about motivation. “You had it made. You could have called your shots. A commission or a soft berth at Pendleton. Why come back to this rat race? You of all people should know what our chances of getting back alive are.” According to Phyllis Basilone Cutter, John answered this way: “When I left the theatre of operations on Guadalcanal [it was actually Australia] to come back stateside, I promised my buddies I would return and that promise I didn’t make lightly.” He didn’t make it back, however, not specifically to them. With the brothers in Hawaii, George continued to argue. “You were lucky to get back alive. Why push your luck?” But John wasn’t having any. “George, the Marine Corps is my whole life. Without it the rest seems empty. This thing I have to do, something keeps pushing me. I now know what I want. If I don’t make it, try and explain to the folks. I know they always loved me. God knows I do them, but this is bigger than family and loved ones and I must do it.” This sounds too pious and self-effacing to be convincing. Phyllis, with her brother George surely the source, must have attempted to quote John accurately. Why would she phony up her beloved brother’s words on something as serious as the possibility of his own death? It’s just that the words are so stilted.

  Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser take a crack at describing what it must have been like in that landing craft carrying Basilone to Iwo and his destiny. But how much of this is to be believed? Recall that Cutter once told me that they “made up” some of their reporting.

  According to Cutter and Proser, it was a bitter John Basilone who got into the landing craft. “We filed down the gangways into the ship’s steel belly. Half of my boys loaded into amphibious tractor 3C27 with me. Amtrac 3C27 was an armor plated rectangular tub made for delivering men onto a beach. It rode low and slow in the water.” As the concussions from the big naval guns roiled the ocean and created waves, and the small craft circled slowly waiting for orders, men began getting seasick, including some of the twenty-five Marines in Basilone’s boat. And we have the sergeant unsure about whether he should talk straight to his men before they reached the beach. Should he assure them that the big guns and aerial bombing were paving the way to a successful assault, or tell them truly how bad it just might be? According to Cutter, Basilone was ambivalent: “It’s going to be all right, boys. They’re going to be as dizzy as shit-house rats after we get done pounding ’em. I lied—just as Topside lied to us, when they told us it would be over in 72 hours. All of us vets knew that 72 hours was pure bullshit and said so. It was like an involuntary reaction. The minute it dropped from the C.O.’s mouth, it sounded like a dozen men coughed at once. But it was a dozen mumbled ‘bullshits’ jumping right off the lips of us vets. We couldn’t help it. There were 23,000 [sic] trained Japanese jungle fighters straight ahead who had been digging in and calibrating their guns for the last three months.” Cutter’s book leaves Basilone’s dilemma unsolved. What did he actually tell his men? It is not clear that he said anything. And not to quibble, but there was no jungle on Iwo Jima for those “Japanese jungle fighters” to exploit.

  The book goes on to describe the landing craft’s ride toward the beach, the men puking, the shells passing overhead, Basilone’s memories of prewar Japanese golfers at the Raritan Valley Country Club, his premonitions of a war to come. Then it reels off into what seems to be pure fiction in which Basilone, the hardened combat veteran and professional gunnery sergeant, behaves like a clown: “A few more of the boys tossed their steak and eggs as we came around. Tension had been ratcheting up as we turned around in circles at the rally point. This was it, we were going in. I got up behind the .50 caliber machine gun mounted by the driver. Orders were not to fire unless we saw enemy, but I knew we wouldn’t see any. After three months of waiting for us, they were dug in too deep, and the Japs were too good at camouflage. We wouldn’t see a damn thing. So I planned to shoot everything just to be sure. I chambered the .50 and squeezed off a few rounds. The driver [remember, the ‘driver,’ a Navy coxswain, was in command of the craft, not a Marine sergeant along as passenger] reminded me of orders not to fire unless we saw something, and I gave him my opinion. ‘Fuck orders and fuck you, Mac.’”

  This is just crazy. At a time when a veteran platoon leader should be calming and reassuring his seasick, scared, green troops about to hit a hostile beach under fire, and whatever Cutter and Proser’s good intentions to show Basilone off at his dynamic, decisive warrior’s best, the passage only brings into question his leadership skills, his emotional stability, and his savvy as a combat veteran at a critical moment. First, the small craft was pitching and tossing so wildly that men were “puking,” which meant there was no stable platform on which Basilone could stand while firing. They were not in the first wave but in the fourth wave, so that other Marines, several thousand of them, were already ashore and in the sights of that .50-caliber gun he’d just commandeered and was arrogantly threatening to fire beachward, quite possibly at his fellow Marines! And here is the experienced, cool Sergeant Basilone, who should at this point be preparing his men to hit the beach, counseling the reluctant or afraid, soothing the overexcited, doing none of these things. Instead, he’s jumping up, cursing out the coxswain, grabbing the .50-caliber to fire off a few random rounds, not at any target he can see but just generally in the direction of the beach where his most likely victims would be fellow Marines. This is not believable and is insulting to Manila John.

  Cutter’s story of Basilone’s arrival on the beach at Iwo grows more bizarre. Now, as the amtrac rolls up on the sand and encounters steep terraces that slow and then halt its progress, the Marines leap out into deep, clinging black sand. As the Marines and their “Doberman war dogs” (first mention of those, by the way) try to dig in, Gunnery Sergeant Basilone issues his first order to the machine gunners, not to organize themselves, and then position, load, and sight their guns, but instead to “Fix bayonets!”

  He tells the boys to pull out their scout knives, an order given usually when ammo is short or hand-to-hand combat is about to erupt? This is idiotic. If a machine-gun sergeant expects trouble, an enemy counterattack, he gets his machine guns ready to turn back the oncoming Japanese, wipe them out, and break the attack, what Basilone himself did with such lethal effectiveness on the ’Canal. Neither machine gunners nor assistant gunners even carry bayonets, though ammo carriers who are armed with carbines may do so (“which weren’t worth diddily shit,” my machine-gun expert Charles Curley assures me). The Japanese counterattack never came, not at the beach, where there were already four Marine waves ashore and a fifth arriving on the heels of Basilone’s fourth. The problem now was for NCOs like Basilone to help get the men on the beach unscrambled and to head inland, in Manila John’s case, toward an airstrip, Motoyama #1.

  Basilone’s later words on the beach itself, via Cutter, once we get beyond the just plain silly “Fix bayonets!” sound credible: “They tore us up while we were lying on the beach but me and Lou Plain [a colonel and the regimental executive officer] got this show on the road. We kicked their asses and dragged boys up by the scruffs of their necks. ‘Get the fuck off the beach. Move out!’ we yelled at them over the incoming fire. They were moving over the terraces now and were finding whatever c
over they could in shell craters on the flat land. Bulldozers had punched gaps through the terraces and tanks were on their way up from the beach to support us. A few mixed squads of C and B Company boys were now at the edge of Motoyama #1 Airfield, our first objective. Once we took out the bunker that was slicing open the 4th Division with their cannon, we only had to worry about the snipers, the dug-in artillery looking down on us from Suribachi, and the constant hail storm of mortars that fell from the sky. Other than that, at least we were off the water’s edge. Which had turned into a killing field.”

  25

  I’ve tried to assess which of a number of versions of what hap pened the morning of February 19 is true. But are any of them?

  John Basilone’s sister Phyllis has her version. She loves her brother, but has never seen a war. Her son Jerry Cutter, also not a writer, and his cohort, Jim Proser, have their account. The Marine Corps records say one thing. Leatherneck magazine has stories by various adepts. Charles W. “Chuck” Tatum, one of Basilone’s gunners, has written his own book, Red Blood, Black Sand, and the very professional Douglas “Bill” Lansford, a writer and a Marine who was there, has his recollection. Historian Joe Alexander writes at length of that morning. There’ve been movies with John Wayne and films directed by Clint Eastwood. Dozens of Iwo Jima books. Did Basilone die instantly from a mortar shell? From artillery fire? Did he linger for hours, speaking with a corpsman and even smoking a cigarette? Did he never regain consciousness? Gradually bleed to death of small-arms fire as the official Marine Corps casualty record of the time suggests? His Navy Cross citation says he was killed instantly by a shell. Phyllis says he lived for hours, discussed events, smoked a cigarette. Choose your version.

  Maybe the Japanese have theirs. Or did they ever even know who Manila John was? Few survived to say. You have the sense their Sendai Division troops would have liked Basilone, even welcomed him into their own and very special pantheon of warriors—and then killed him before he could kill them, which he surely would have done and happily. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi might conceivably have greeted Basilone as a fellow samurai, gallant, impassioned, fierce, if a bit crude perhaps, a warrior not overly given to politesse or ritual.

  I believe this was how it really was on that February morning in 1945: Basilone and other Marines headed down into the hold of the LST to board the smaller landing craft that would actually take them through the surf and up onto the black sand beach, the medium LCMs and the smaller personnel-carrying LCVPs, the tractorlike amphibians they called amtracs. Navy coxswains piloted the assault waves to the shore, backed out, returned to their mother ships, and loaded up again to return with fresh meat for Iwo, men or supplies. There was some wishful thinking in the scuttlebutt men heard that the brass figured it for a seventy-two-hour fight, over in three days, maybe five. “Bullshit,” said others, including vets like Basilone. But what the hell, anything was possible.

  Historian Joe Alexander sketches the scene. “The massive assault waves [two reinforced infantry regiments from each of the two attacking divisions, the 4th and the 5th] hit the beach within two minutes of H-Hour. A Japanese observer watching the drama unfold from a cave on the slopes of Suribachi reported, ‘At nine o’clock in the morning several hundred landing craft with amphibious tanks in the lead rushed ashore like an enormous tidal wave.’” The executive officer of the 28th Marines recalled, “The landing was a magnificent sight to see, two divisions landing abreast; you could see the whole show from the deck of a ship.” If you were closer than shipboard, it wasn’t all that “magnificent.” It was too close. The tracked amphibious vehicles bellied down in the soft sand, and the wheeled vehicles simply spun their wheels. Some of the smaller landing craft swung sideways in the surf, a few capsized, men had to bail out heavy-laden in deeper water, some drowned. But from the distant vantage points on the ships, everything looked great. If you have enough rank, and are far enough from the gunfire, the perspective is always terrific. I attended only one war, a small one, but I was an infantryman, a rifle platoon leader. I never enjoyed that luxury of distance. At that point, from the ships, it was still a “show”—but not for long.

  On shore, the enemy patiently waited for orders. Kuribayashi had made only one small blunder so far: when the underwater demolition teams going in before the first wave had been spotted, instead of ignoring the mere handful of invaders, the general had permitted some of his artillery targeting the beach to fire at the demo teams, tipping off their hidden positions to the counterbattery crews of the bigger guns on the battleships, the eight-inch-gun heavy cruisers, Marine aviation, and the big bombers, causing the Japanese guns considerable counterbattery damage. Otherwise, the Japanese were smart. They accepted that the Marines, some of them, maybe a lot, would reach the beach alive and in condition to fight. The enemy had no illusions of stopping them all on the way in or in the surf before they landed. If there had to be Americans on the three-thousand-yard black sand beach, why not withhold fire until there were plenty of them, thousands of Marines instead of mere hundreds of potential targets? Let the first waves land and be reinforced, and then when the narrow beach was clogged with Marines and their weapons and supplies amid the usual chaos, confusion, shouting, and mixed signals, exacerbated by the nerviness of men fresh to the fight, the contradictory orders and wild firing at nothing, hit them hard. Hit them with everything. That would be when the Marines were most vulnerable. What a target of opportunity. What a slaughter. The disciplined Japanese held back, held back, held back.

  As Kuribayashi assessed his intelligence reports from the many observers, including the handful of Zeroes overhead surveying the scene and dodging the American fighters, he at last gave the orders for his artillery to fire their beach concentrations, target areas already zeroed in on weeks or even months before, crosshatched down to the last square meter of black sand. Sand now covered with American Marines, their weapons, and their packs, their sergeants and officers trying to get the men organized into fire teams, squads, platoons, and companies and saddled up to push inland to engage the enemy. And to get the hell off the soon-to-be lethal beach. It was at that delicate stage of operations that the artillery crashed down murderously on the first four or five waves of Marine infantry, as they admitted, “bare-assed naked,” because you couldn’t dig foxholes in the soft, shifting and blowing black sand. Shovel with your entrenching tool, watch the sand slide back into the hole, and shovel again. Corporal Ed Hartman, a 4th Division rifleman, said, “The sand was so soft it was like trying to run in loose coffee grounds.” Shoveling it was worse; you dug and dug and still didn’t have a deep hole to shelter in. And by then you might be dead.

  Bill Lansford, a World War II Marine and one of the legendary Carlson’s Raiders, later a Hollywood screenwriter, still residing in California, gives us this account of Basilone’s and his own first hours on the island. Lansford, an old pal of Basilone’s who was by now in a different outfit (a job at regimental HQ) and in a later wave, wrote about it for Leatherneck magazine:

  “On the morning of 19 February, 1945, we hit Red Beach on Iwo and started climbing its black sides under a storm of enemy mortar and artillery. Basilone had landed one wave earlier and apparently moved in. He didn’t know how to stand still. ‘Let’s go in and set up them guns for firing,’ a correspondent later quoted him. Whose guns the correspondent is talking about is hard to imagine. From the moment we landed it was total confusion: platoons and companies mixed up and in the wrong places; men and equipment sinking into the black sand while officers and NCOs drifted about, looking for their men. All that as Kuribayashi’s pre-sighted weapons tore our battalions to pieces.

  “In the midst of the hellish noise and confusion,” Lansford wrote, “two Marines were seen moving among the stalled troops shouting, cursing, and moving them out. One was Colonel Louis C. Plain, the regimental executive officer of the 27th Marines, who would soon be wounded and evacuated, the other was John Basilone. Having cleared a path for the troops on the beach, Basilone
gathered several more Marines, set up a base of fire, and ordered them to hold while he went back for more men and weapons. On his way Basilone spotted three M-4 Sherman tanks, their water-cooled V-8s grinding like hell as they struggled up the beach under heavy fire. Knowing their value for knocking out bunkers, Basilone immediately took over.”

  There is usually a telephone on the exterior rear of tanks, and it may be that Basilone was using that to communicate with the crew inside and give them the benefit of his superior field of vision outside the buttoned-up vehicle.

  Lansford continues: “Sergeant Adolph Brusa, a mortar squad leader, remembered he suddenly looked up and there was this lone Marine with those tanks. ‘And I said to myself, that’s John Basilone! What the hell is he doing standing up when everyone else is hugging the ground?’ What Basilone was doing was guiding the tanks through a minefield and pointing out targets while completely exposed to the fire aimed at the Shermans.”

  We’ve got to wonder, how would a machine-gun sergeant just off the beach know where the enemy minefields were located? There is no description I can find of Basilone’s going ahead of the tanks on hands and knees, probing with a bayonet for the telltale clank of metal on metal as Marines were trained to do when traversing mined areas. And defenders don’t usually leave marking stakes to alert an oncoming foe. I accept the other suggestion, his pointing out targets of opportunity to the tankers. Good infantrymen do that.